Insights From Academics on Sex and the Civil War, Segregation Scholarships, HIV/AIDs, & More

Listen to authors talk about their books and learn something new on the UNC Press Presents podcast, produced by the New Books Network. With recent episodes on sex and the Civil War, American diet culture, the history segregation scholarships in the south, and much more, you’re bound to learn something new or discover your new favorite read. In this post we’re highlighting some of our recent episodes but you can also browse all episodes directly from the UNC Press Presents webpage, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Judith Giesberg, author of Sex and the Civil War, in conversation with Michael Amico

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War discusses her latest books Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality.

Tune in for a conversation with Adrian de Leon, author of Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, and Stephen Hausmann, Mellon Fellow with the National Park Service

In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: what if we look at Filipino history not from the cities or the imperial metropoles, but from the mountains and the countryside? Or put another way, from the “bundok,” the Tagalog word for “mountain” which American soldiers in the late 19th century would come to use as a catachall for the places they found themselves fighting imperial wars.

Crystal R. Sanders talks with Mickell Carter about her Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs

A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs tells the little-known story of “segregation scholarships” awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre-Brown v. Board of Education era. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.

Travis A. Weisse on his new book Health Freaks: America’s Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness

Travis A. Weisse tells a new history of modern diets in America that goes beyond the familiar narrative of the nation’s collective failure to lose weight. By exploring how the popularity of diets grew alongside patients’ frustrations with the limitations and failures of the American healthcare system in the face of chronic disease, Weisse argues that millions of Americans sought “fad” diets—such as the notorious Atkins program which ushered in the low-carbohydrate craze—to wrest control of their health from pessimistic doctors and lifelong pharmaceutical regimens.

Paul M. Renfro, author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America, talks about the history of HIV/AIDs

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. In 1985, he became a household name after he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school. Reexamining Ryan’s story reveals how the consequences of this stigma continue to pervade policy and cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS today.